Grace Presbyterian Church, Montclair, New Jersey

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Pastor's Pulse

by Paul Leggett, Pastor

Suffering, Sin, and Love

July 2008

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” – Romans 8:18

The question of suffering remains the most difficult issue Christians have to face in sharing their faith.  There are the standard questions many of which have been revived in current best-sellers promoting the idea of atheism.  If God is good and all powerful why is there so much suffering in the world?  Either God is not really good and therefore tragedies occur daily or He is not all powerful and cannot stop the suffering we all witness so constantly.  So the argument goes.  These questions are not new and they certainly are not simple.  Yet these objections often overlook critical themes which the Bible brings forward in its treatment of the subject.  The Bible raises the question frequently and forcefully.  The psalmist repeatedly asks, “Why?”  Jesus himself quotes form the psalms on the cross when he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1). 

There are no easy answers to specific questions of suffering (“Why did this have to happen to me?”).  Yet this is a far cry from the often easy dismissal made by some today that the Bible has no convincing answer to the problem of suffering and evil.  There are three central themes in Scripture which must be considered if we are to make any sense of suffering and tragedy.  The first is, the nature of human beings.  Human beings are made “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:26). We are a “little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:5).  As such we humans, unlike the rest of creation, have freedom, a moral sense and a perception of ourselves which can transcend the limitations of the moment.  In other words we have imagination.  We can conceive not only of the actual that we see but also of the possible which we don’t see.  Adam and Eve could conceive, for example, of being “like God” (Genesis 3:5).  Human beings, therefore, in a Biblical sense, have great power and potential.  We are not accidents of nature or biology.  We have a divine sense and the ability to use it in imaginative and creative ways.  Our choices have a great range.  They can be good or bad.  They can follow God or turn away from him.

This brings us to the second theme, the nature of sin.  In the varied world of God’s creation sin exists.  We don’t know its precise origin but it is that which is other than God, indeed opposite of God.  When God created the world as something different from himself, this “opposite” inevitably became a possibility.  Sin takes many forms.  It is personal as in Satan (I John 3:8).  It is cosmic as in the “sons of God” (Genesis 6:1-5) or “the elemental spirits of the universe” (Colossians 2:8).  These forces seek to undermine God’s good order constantly.  The original goodness of creation breaks down in the face of “famines and earthquakes in various places” (Matthew 24:7).  As human beings following the example of Adam and Eve, we have chosen to sin.  This is so pervasive that all of us now are born in sin (Psalm 51:5).  When we choose sin we unleash chaos on the world.  God in his creation brought order into an original chaos (Genesis 1:!-5).  When we sin we in effect seek to undermine that order and invoke chaos.  Chaos is part of the nature of sin.  Sin is neither fair nor just.  Once we bring sin into the world the innocent suffer and the guilty are rewarded.  That is the nature of sin.  It is the reversal of God’s good creation.

So, we are asked, if God is all-powerful why doesn’t he just stop all this?  If God is stronger than Satan and “the cosmic powers of this present darkness” (Ephesians 6:12) why doesn’t he just do away with all of them?  Certainly God can do whatever he desires short of denying his own basic nature.  God could have chosen never to have created a world.  But God did create the world.  And he created us.  This brings us to the third and most important Biblical theme, the nature of love.  The atheist has no explanation for the reality of love.  Simply pointing to some altruistic biological function which supposedly preserves the species never can answer the particular question of why someone loves me or why I love them.  Still less can it answer the question of why God loves the world (John 3:16-17).  According to Scripture God is ultimately not power.  God is love (I John 4:8).  God has created a world he could love and that could love him in return.  Power is not able to eliminate evil and sin.  Only love can do that.  God does not need to be loved but God has chosen to create us to love him (Matthew 22:37-38).  The deeper question of love occupied some of the greatest minds in history, Christians as well as non-Christians.  This question cannot be set aside by the simplistic arguments of a Woody Allen film or a current best-seller. 

According to Scripture human beings are created to love and be loved because God is love.  God could take away all contingencies and all choices to make a world without suffering.  But when I hear that simple kind of argument I think of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  They offer the “perfect” solution of transforming humanity into “pod people,” thereby creating a world that’s at peace because no one cares about anything except simple existence.  We could fashion a world without suffering but it would also be a world without love, without faith. 

The apostle Paul, along with the rest of Scripture, does present the hope of a perfect world.  This world however cannot come into being without suffering.  The ultimate suffering is that of God himself on the cross.  It is only from the cross that we experience resurrection, the final end of sin and suffering.